Samsung’s Galaxy Note range gives you what you get in other high-end Galaxy phones, with a little more added on top. The S-Pen stylus is the most important topping of them all.

Samsung has made sure there are other superlatives in the Galaxy Note 9, like a 512GB version and the “biggest battery” in a Note to date. The Note 9 has just one special move to pull for those interested in genuinely new and potentially interesting features, though.

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The S-Pen stylus now functions as a Bluetooth remote. Apple’s Pencil doesn’t. It won’t change lives, but does give Samsung an all-important new feature to cling to. That matters in a phone this pricey.

Note 9 will go on sale on August 24, and costs £899 for the 128GB variant, £1,099 for the 512GB one. This makes it less expensive than an iPhone X, but still one of the priciest phones in the world.

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Familiar S-Pen, new features

The new S-Pen stylus is the most interesting part of the Note 9, largely because almost all of its other “innovations” were made earlier this year in the Galaxy S9 and S9+.

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Like previous S-Pens, it uses digitiser tech under license from graphics tablet master Wacom. This doesn’t require a battery, and can sense 4,096 levels of pressure.

The Note 9’s stylus is not just a digitiser pen, though. It is also a Bluetooth controller. Wacom’s digitiser needs just an inductive coil in the pen’s end, but Bluetooth needs a battery, just like the Apple Pencil.

Samsung’s strategy is totally different to Apple’s, though. The Apple Pencil is a fairly thick stylus that lasts for 12 hours off a charge. The Note 9’s S-Pen is only a fraction of a millimetre thicker than that of the Note 8. It still slots into a hole on the phone’s bottom.

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The battery only lasts roughly 30 minutes, or 200 clicks, and given the ultra-low power consumption of the Bluetooth LE connection it uses, the cell inside must be miniscule. But the battery recharges within a minute when back in its “slot”, and the power is only needed for Bluetooth commands, not scrawling on the screen.

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Andrew Williams

Like the last S-Pen, there’s just one button, on its shaft. There’s a clicker on top, but this is to help insert and remove the pen from the Note 9’s body. And it makes a useful, if annoying, stress-reliever.

What can the button do? Clicks will play/pause music, take a photo and switch to the selfie camera, or change slides in a presentation. It can stop and start Samsung’s voice recorder app and cycle through photos in “Gallery”. Just like the controls on a pair of Bluetooth headphones, single and double presses are distinct commands.

The S-Pen SDK will also be available to developers later this year, letting them use it in their own apps. Obvious questions: which apps really need such a remote function, and which app developers will find using their resources in this way, for a single phone, worthwhile?

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Laptop-like credentials

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In all other respects the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is like the Note 8, with either newer bits inside, or simply more. Storage is the one other element that may widen a few eyes. The standard £899 Note 9 has 128GB storage, upped to a huge 512GB in the £1,099 version. This is more than most laptops. Even expensive £1,000-plus lines tend to start with 256GB SSDs.

Unlike almost every other ultra-high capacity phone, the Note 9 can also use a microSD card, for maximum storage of 1TB. This may not be the kind of excess to make Bacchus proud, but it is excess nevertheless.

The Note 9 also has DeX built-in. This is a custom Android interface that emulates the style of a laptop/desktop OS, to make it seem more at home on a TV or monitor. Microsoft tried a similar idea with a desktop dock for its phones in 2015. It failed because the dock itself cost $99. And Microsoft phones were hardly popular by this point anyway.

A DeX dock is available for the S9, but most have ignored the feature because a dock is required. The Note 9 won’t change that, despite needing just a cable to get DeX up on a larger screen. Replacing a desktop or laptop with your phone should in theory be a feature for normal people who don’t need that much tech. But for the most part only geeks know these features even exist.

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More of the same

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In other areas, Samsung has struggled to make the Note 9 seem “more” than its predecessor without making the phone harder to use. The screen measures 6.4 inches across, just 0.1 inches big than the Note 8’s. It’s a fractional difference that, side-by-side with the Note 8, is not particularly evident. However, this is still one of the largest-screen phones available that does not stretch your hand’s willingness to put up with its width.

A light screen curve and the Galaxy series’ characteristic slim surrounds are among the most aggressive around, even though the Galaxy Note 9 does not have a “notch”. It uses one of Samsung’s market-leading Super AMOLED panels, and there’s no finger scanner under the surface, one genuinely new phone feature we’re likely to see proliferate in the next 12 months. The finger scanner sits on the back, in rather ordinary fashion.

Andrew Williams

You can expect much the same camera and general performance as the Galaxy S9+ too. In the UK the Note 9 will use a Samsung Exynos 8910 processor with either 6GB of RAM (128GB storage model) or 8GB (512GB), and has the same dual 12-megapixel camera array as the S9+.

There’s just one significant change for the Note 9, and it relates to the software rather than the hardware. An intelligent shooting mode will tell you if you take a photo that seems blurred, or in which someone has their eyes closed. That’s right, the Note 9 will tell you you’re a bad photographer.

How the new Samsung Galaxy Note 9 compares to the S9 and Note 8

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However, in the “phone camera AI” stakes, this should actually be of more interest to photographers than the AI scene modes used in the Huawei P20 Pro. Huawei and LG latest processing developments tend to radically oversaturate photos when they spot an orange, some grass, a blue sky: just about any object associated with vivid colour. If you want natural-looking shots, that the Note 9 lets you know a certain shot is a dud is more useful.

The Galaxy Note 9 comes in four finishes: black, purple, copper and blue. All have S-Pens of a matching colour apart from Ocean Blue, which comes with a yellow stylus.

Will many people use DeX instead of a laptop? Probably not. Will many regularly use the S-Pen as a remote control? Probably not. But you have to appreciate the sheer effort Samsung has exerted to add something new. It’s getting harder to do.